This is my first review for anything on the internet, The reason I am writing this review is to provide my point of view to help engineers who are looking to join Aricent. I am going to provide my review in sections.
*General:*
Well Aricent is basically a service provided company of around 10K employees. The company has office in Bangalore, Gurgaon and Chennai in India. My review is for Gurgaon location.
*Learning:*
In my opinion Aricent is good place for learning. You will get a lot of opportunity to do coding and experimenting with open source technology. But on the other side since this is a service provider company chances are very low that your interest will be accounted before assigning you to a project.
But if you have worked in a project for more than one year, you can apply for other department project without the need of your manager approval. So its not that you will be stuck in one project always. you can always change
*Work Culture:*
This is the area where Aricent needs lots of improvements. The company does not follow professional work culture, Its very rare that you will see fun activity happening in company . And even if it is happening your manager will not encourage you to join those activity. Interaction between employee is very limited and there are very low chances of making friends.
*Salary:*
This is another area where Aricent needs improvement. The company does not do salary correction with market. Most of the time you will get only 70% of your Yearly bonus. Without any significant valid reasons. General increment is mostly less than 8%. Onsite allowance are also very low.
*Ethics and Management:*
Aricent is mainly business oriented company and not employee oriented company. keeping this in mind, most of the decision are made to increase business with reduction of investments. Most of the managers in the company are employee who are in company for more then 10 years, they have the feeling that they are like boss in the company, So they are not willing to change or learn new culture. You will hear most of employee calling each other with "sir" title which I don’t like.
However, there are good people also. Management decisions does not take employee interest in account, for example notice period for employee has been increased from two months to three months without any good reasons, initially bonus percentage was two times in the year with 50/ 50%. Now it has been changed to 70, 30%. and if you will resign in between your complete bonus will be taken away.
Most of the projects are not well planned due to this timeliness are always tight. Which means you will have to work on weekends as well. Most of the Managers do not encourage you to take leaves or go on holidays or breaks, due to mismanagement and delivery timelines.
*Conclusion:*
In my opinion if you are looking for quick learning technology, improving your programming skills, exposure to open source technology Aricent is good place, but this is not the place for long term commitments.
With no hard feelings and above information is my personal opinion only.